"I ought to have known better," she said, returning to the business again with a wry smile. "I ought to have known it couldn't have lasted."
"It isn't that I love you any the less," he said, unconsciously quoting a phrase in his letter. "I don't know how to explain my attitude.... I love you just the same ... but, somehow...."
"Don't, don't explain," she interrupted. "I understand. Of course it's impossible if you think like that. And, of course, Humphrey, there's no need to talk of love...." She laughed a little, and then, really, she could not spare him any more. "Oh, what a boy you are!"
He flushed hotly. "I know you've always looked upon me as a boy," he said. "You think I'm a child ... but it takes a man to do what I'm doing ... it takes courage to face it out ... it hurts."
"Oh, you are a boy," she said, with a little hysterical laugh. "Of course you're only a boy." She pushed her plate away from her. "Don't you see what you've done—you've broken up everything."
And she put her head on her arms outstretched on the table, and sobbed and sobbed again.
He watched her shoulders tremble with her sobs, and heard her accusing words repeat themselves in a pitiful refrain in his ears. At that moment he touched, it seemed, the lowest depths of meanness. He felt awkward and foolish.... She was crying, and he could do nothing. "Lilian ... Lilian," he pleaded, touching her hand that was flat on the table. "Don't—I didn't mean to." Heavens! if she did not stop, he would snatch her to him, and kiss her hotly, and let Ferrol and the world and all its success go by him for ever.
The waiter saved the situation. His knock came as a warning, and when he entered the room with more plates and a greasier smile, he found the lady at the window flinging it open widely and complaining of the heat, the gentleman looking moodily before him, and the food barely touched.
"You no like the fricassee, sare?" he said, turning the rejected food with his fork.
"It's all right," Humphrey said, in a voice that the waiter knew to mean "Get out." "No appetite to-day."